Email scammer pleads guilty to defrauding Texas firms out of more than $500,000

A 64-year-old man has admitted his role in an email-based fraud scheme that relied on spoofed email addresses to con two companies out of more than $500,000. Kenety Kim, or Myung Kim, pleaded guilty Tuesday in a Texas court to conspiracy to commit money laundering as part his role in a business email compromise scheme. Kim used email addresses that impersonated legitimate corporate accounts to intercept financial transfers, or to convince a firm to direct money into an account under Kim’s control, according to the plea deal. As part of his agreement with U.S. prosecutors, Kim acknowledged that he has earned more than $700,000 from a web of fraud schemes, including some for which he was not charged. In one incident, he created an email account that appeared to belong to a construction company based in Pinehurst. then used that to ask another company, based in Huntsville, to send him […]

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CrowdStrike revenue jumps amid work-from-home orders

CrowdStrike reported a total revenue of $178.1 million during the first quarter of fiscal year 2021, a massive uptick that coincided with ongoing concerns about the strength of the global economy during the coronavirus pandemic. In its quarterly earnings report released Tuesday, the Sunnyvale-based company said its $178.1 million in revenue marked an 85% increase over the $96.1 million during the same period last year. Much of that revenue came from product subscriptions, with executives suggesting that the sudden move to telecommuting boosted CrowdStrike’s presence in the market. The financial disclosure pertains to the period ending on April 30, 2020. Total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020 was $152.1 million, the company said. “With both security administrators and end-users working from home, we believe the rapid shift to a remote workforce has helped increase our leadership,” chief executive George Kurtz said in a statement. “We achieved 88% [annual recurring […]

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North Korea issues blanket denial to US hacking accusations

The North Korean government issued a statement denying U.S. allegations that hackers used cyberattacks to raise money on Pyongyang’s behalf. U.S. and international cybersecurity officials, along with private sector specialists, have accused North Korean hackers of infiltrating global financial networks, stealing from ATMs, and demanding ransoms in bitcoin as part of a wider effort to help the government evade sanctions. The FBI, along with the departments of Homeland Security, Treasury and State, issued an advisory in May warning that North Korean hackers had used an array of malicious software tools to continue their operations. “We know well that the ulterior intention of the United States is to tarnish the image of our state and create a moment for provoking us by employing a new leverage called ‘cyber threat’ together with the issues of nuke, missiles, ‘human rights,’ ‘sponsoring of terrorism’ and ‘money laundering,’” North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said […]

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New York man nabbed for carrying computers with stolen credit card details through JFK, feds say

A New York City man caught carrying multiple computers containing thousands of stolen credit card numbers has been charged with an array of hacking-related crimes, U.S. prosecutors announced. Vitalii Antonenko was charged in Massachusetts on multiple counts of conspiracy – to commit computer hacking, launder money and traffic in stolen payment card numbers – in connection with a scheme to sell stolen data on cybercriminal markets. The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that Antonenko, 28, was apprehended in March upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport from Ukraine. He was charged Tuesday. Attorneys representing Antonenko did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. Antonenko, along with two unidentified co-conspirators, offered stolen data for sale on multiple carding websites dating back to 2012, according to a complaint. Law enforcement officials working undercover on the unnamed website spent more than two years, from June 2015 through September […]

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Judge rules Capital One must hand over Mandiant’s forensic data breach report

A court has ruled that Capital One must allow plaintiffs to review a cybersecurity firm’s forensic report related to the bank’s 2019 data breach despite the bank’s protests that it is a protected legal document. A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled Tuesday that attorneys suing Capital One on behalf of customers could review a copy of an incident response report to prepare for a possible trial. The Virginia-based bank had sought to keep the report private on the grounds that it was protected under legal doctrine. Yet U.S. Magistrate Judge John Anderson said the report, prepared by Mandiant, was the result of a business agreement, and that the legal doctrine argument was “unpersuasive.” It’s a significant ruling which effectively affords the attorneys suing Capital One with a breakdown of which bank behaviors were successful, and which failed. It’s common for Fortune 500 […]

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‘Valak’ gives crooks flexibility in multi-stage malware attacks

Hackers often plant their malicious software on computers in stages. One piece of code can be a foothold onto a network, another delivers the malware, and yet another executes it to steal or manipulate data. But looks can be deceiving. The same code used as a staging tool in one attack might be the tip of the spear in another. For targeted organizations, spotting the difference can mean saving your data. That’s the case with a malicious program that has been used in hacking attempts against multiple economic sectors in the U.S. and Germany in the last six months, according to research published Thursday by security company Cybereason. About 150 organizations in the financial, retail, manufacturing, and health care sectors have been targeted by the Valak malware since it emerged late last year, the researchers said. More than just a “loader” that delivers malicious code, Valak can also be used […]

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Lawsuit seeking billions in damages filed against EasyJet

Lawyers always seem to recognize a good data breach when they see one. A British law firm, PGMBM, announced Tuesday it filed a lawsuit against EasyJet, the largest airline in the U.K., in connection with a security incident in which details about 9 million people were exposed. The firm is seeking up to £18 billion ($22 billion), including up to 30% in fees, or roughly £5.4 billion ($6.6 billion), for itself. The suit in London’s High Court follows similar legal action against British Airways, which announced its own data breach in 2018. EasyJet said on May 19 that hackers had accessed travel information about up to 9 million people, and credit card details belonging to more than 2,000 people. While it remains unclear exactly when the breach occurred, the BBC first reported that EasyJet had learned of the attack in January, only to disclose it months later. Some customers have […]

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Federal officials have arrested another accused FIN7 hacker

A Ukrainian national was arrested last week in Seattle for his alleged involvement in hacking operations run by FIN7, a syndicate known for stealing approximately $1 billion from its victims in the United States. According to court documents obtained by CyberScoop, Denys Iarmak has been charged with conspiracy to commit computer hacking, accessing a protected computer to commit fraud, intentional damage to a protected computer, access device fraud, conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. The arrest is a significant move against financially motivated FIN7, which has targeted the hospitality and gaming industries in the last several years.  FIN7 has gone after restaurants including Chipotle, Red Robin, Taco John, as well as a credit union and a casino. According to the court documents, Iarmak was part of a scheme where operators allegedly ran spearphishing campaigns to gain unauthorized access to victim computers, deploy malware, conduct […]

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Trust us, information sharing can work. Here’s how we’re doing it.

You know what’s worse than trying to share cybersecurity information? Writing about it. Everyone has read over and over again about how important information sharing is for cybersecurity. The idea is certainly not new. It’s definitely not cool. It’s also hard. No one has completely nailed it even after talking about it for decades. Why is information sharing so hard and why are we still working on it? We’ve identified plenty of barriers and worked to address them. In many cases, we’ve addressed them quite well. For example, information sharing is tough from a technical perspective because the volume and speed of data continues to increase. So the community developed standards like STIX (Structured Threat Information eXchange) as a common language to share indicators and context at machine speed, TAXII (Trusted Automated eXchange of Intelligence Information) to provide a protocol for the transfer of information, and MITRE’s ATT&CK framework for […]

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Zeus’s legacy lives on as crooks target banking customers in the US and Europe

Over a decade since the infamous Zeus malware surfaced, scammers are still using variants of that code to try to steal data from banking customers on multiple continents. Since the beginning of the year, various criminal hacking groups have been using a descendant of Zeus in more than 100 phishing campaigns and some 700,000 emails against people in Australia, Canada, Germany, Poland, and the U.S., email security company Proofpoint said this week. Like countless other hackers around the world, they are trying to capitalize on fears around the coronavirus to slip their code onto victim computers. The ZLoader campaign shows how one piece of code is still inspiring criminals years after law enforcement identified it as pernicious. After malicious hackers had used Zeus malware to steal over $100 million from victims, the Department of Justice disrupted a Zeus-based botnet in 2014 and put a $3 million bounty out for information leading to the arrest of Zeus’s alleged […]

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